


To Be Myself (Short Version)

by wowbright



Series: To Be Myself [2]
Category: Glee, Yentl (1983)
Genre: 1980s, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - 1980s, Gen, Unrequited Crush, unrequited kurt/finn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-23
Updated: 2013-07-23
Packaged: 2018-04-28 17:15:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,442
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5098793
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wowbright/pseuds/wowbright
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The movie Yentl may very well have saved Kurt’s life. (AU gen drama with a hint of Klaine romance; it’s what Kurt’s life might have looked like had all the characters been born 26 years earlier than their canon birthdays.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	To Be Myself (Short Version)

**Author's Note:**

> **New notes:** This is the free-write that inspired the longer chaptered fic. I posted it as part of Tubular 80s Klaine Week in 2013. The original post is on [tumblr](http://wowbright.tumblr.com/post/56305378354/fic-to-be-myself).
> 
>  **Original notes:** This is a story about friendship, love and hope. But it takes place in the early- to mid-1980s, so you can expect it to contain plenty of bigotry, ignorance, and offensive ways of talking and thinking about about gay people, HIV/AIDS, people with HIV/AIDS, and people of various ethnicities. Opinions of characters do not equal author’s opinions, et cetera.

Today’s theme for Tubular 80s Klaine Week is movies. That made me wonder what movies Kurt and/or Blaine might have loved if they had been teenagers in the 1980s.  _Yentl_  – the 1983 Barbra Streisand musical about a Jewish girl in early 1900s Eastern Europe who disguises herself as a boy so she can go to school – seemed an obvious choice.

Why so obvious? Well, besides being Barbra and thus perfect for Kurt, the story of  _Yentl_  is about a boy (or someone who presents as a boy) falling in love with another boy, and being afraid to tell him. (A more complete synopsis of the movie can be found [here](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086619/plotsummary).)

The climax of the movie is the song “No Matter What Happens,” i.e. the most popular coming-out song of 1983. Here is the scene from the movie, and the lyrics:

_I’ve wanted the shadows, I don’t anymore._  
No matter what happens, I won’t anymore.  
I’ve run from the sunlight, afraid it saw too much.  
The moon had the one light I bathed in – I walked in.  
I held in my feelings and closed every door.  
No matter what happens, I can’t anymore.  
There’s someone who must hear the words I’ve never spoken.  
Tonight if he were here my silence would be broken.  
I need him to touch me, to know the love that’s in my heart –  
The same heart that tells me to see myself, to free myself, to be myself at last!

I pictured Kurt seeing  _Yentl_ for the first time in the theater with Rachel. It was the winter break of 1983-1984; they were freshmen in high school, and on a date. A real date, not a date between friends. Kurt wasn’t out to anyone; it was toward the beginning of the AIDS crisis, and telling anyone you were gay – well, they all would have assumed he had AIDS and he would have become a social pariah. (AIDS was known as “the gay plague” and “the gay cancer”; the virus that causes AIDS – HIV – hadn’t yet been identified and there was general ignorance about how it might be transmitted; gay men were routinely fired etc. for the usual homophobic reasons, but now with the added and seemingly altruistic justification that it had to be done because they might spread AIDS to their coworkers. In 1985, Ryan White, a hemophiliac who contracted HIV from a blood transfusion, would be barred from attending his middle school when it became known he had AIDS. People worried you could catch it the way you catch a cold. The prevailing superstition was that it was a disease that spontaneously developed in gay men by nature of their very gayness, without them needing to have caught it from anyone; but once a gay man had it, he could spread it to other, non-suspecting, “innocent” non-gay people. I use the term "innocent" intentionally here; it was often used to describe people with HIV/AIDS who were not gay, and took years to fade from common use.)

So Kurt was dating Rachel. They’d started going steady in seventh grade, when they were in the middle school choir together and bonded over their mutual admiration of Barbra Streisand. She might have suspected that Kurt was gay, but she didn’t ask; she didn’t want anything more than a mutual admiration society and an occasional peck on the cheek, and she got both with Kurt, so she was happy.

Rachel had two dads – but no one knew, not even Kurt. She didn’t call either of them “Dad”; they were “Hiram” and “LeRoy.” The story she told people, when they asked, was that LeRoy was her father and Hiram was her uncle; LeRoy had been married to Hiram’s sister, but they divorced soon after; Hiram, who had been best friends with LeRoy since they were students together at Rutgers, moved in to help raise baby Rachel, and then he never could bring himself to leave because Rachel was so charming and delightful. Everything about the story was true except the parts that weren’t, and no one ever questioned it except to ask her why her hair was so straight if her dad was black. “I got my hair from my mother,” she’d say, but it didn’t keep the other kids at school from calling her awful names and asking if her mother left because she couldn’t stand having a black baby, or because she just couldn’t stand Rachel.

 _Yentl_  put Rachel and Kurt both through the emotional ringer. The first time Kurt cried was during “The Way He Makes Me Feel”:

 _Oh, why is it that every time I close my eyes he’s there?_  
The water shining on his skin, the sunlight in his hair?  
And all the while I’m thinking things that I can never share with him.

He was thinking of Finn Hudson, and how much his own body ached when Finn was near, how his hands felt empty because they weren’t holding him.

They both cried during “No Matter What Happens.” Rachel held onto Kurt’s hand and they passed Kurt napkin after napkin from the pile in her lap; he tried to compose himself, but it just got worse; because then Yentl came out to Avigdor and the tears started all over again, and Kurt let out a wracking sob that had Rachel worried he might be having an asthma attack. She held his hand tighter and leaned her forehead against his warm, sticky cheek and asked him to take a deep breath. He did, and the sobbing stopped, but the tears kept going until the credits were halfway through.

Kurt felt wrung out and hollow, and he dreaded the moment that the credits stopped rolling. Rachel was sure to start pummeling him with questions at any moment, or at least to start a rapid verbal deconstruction of the movie’s highlights – but she didn’t. When the theater lights came back on, he could see that she was crying, too. He hadn’t expected that.

She gave him a small smile and leaned across the armrest and pressed a soft, chaste kiss to his cheek. “No matter what happens,” she said, “you’ll always be my best friend.”

They didn’t say anything more about it that night. Hiram picked them up in front of the theater, and gave them both a worried look when they got into the station wagon. “Was the movie that bad?” he said.

“No,” Rachel said, sniffling. “It was that good.”

They got into the backseat and held hands the entire way back to the Kurt’s house. Rachel offered to walk him to the door. He touched her shoulder lightly and said, “No. I’ll be okay.”

*

Kurt didn’t talk about the movie with his dad, but Rachel talked about it with LeRoy and Hiram. She talked about Barbra’s directorial choices and her amazing voice and how hard it must be to love someone and not be able to show it. “I don’t think I ever understood exactly how hard it is for you until now,” she said. “I mean, I knew it was hard, but …” She started to cry again. “And I think,” she sobbed, “I think it’s hard for Kurt, too.”

Hiram and LeRoy traded a careful look, then sat down at the kitchen table with her. LeRoy put a hand on her arm. “You think he’s like us?”

She nodded.

Her parents looked at each other again. Sometimes she hated how they could have entire conversations with their eyes that she was not privy to; but in this moment she understood it was their love that allowed them to do that, and she didn’t hate it at all; she felt warm and safe. “You can tell him about us, if you want to,” Hiram said.

“You mean –” She thought she knew what he meant, but it was hard to believe. “The truth? About our family?” She looked back and forth between LeRoy and Hiram. They both nodded. “But what if he’s not … gay?” she said. She knew it wasn’t a bad word when used matter-of-factly, but still – she was unused to saying it.

“He’s a good boy,” said Hiram. “He won’t hurt us.”

“But –” She twisted her hands together. Over the years, she had accumulated a million reasons why coming out would be a bad idea, and the AIDS crisis had added a million more things that could go wrong. She opened her mouth to start listing them. But for the first time in her life, she was speechless.

She’d been Atlas her whole life, carrying the weight of the world on her shoulders, and she hadn’t even noticed. With her fathers’ permission to tell the truth, the Earth floated up off her back and began to spin on its own, relying just on the gravity of the sun and the moon, and not needing her at all.

She hugged them both.

*

Rachel called Kurt the next day and asked him to go for a walk.

He wasn’t excited about it at first, because it was winter and he didn’t like his nose to get cold. It always turned bluish-pink and made him look like an alcoholic. Couldn’t they go to McDonald’s instead? (There were no coffeehouses in Lima back then; McDonald’s and Baskin-Robbins were the two main places to hang out, and it was much too cold for ice cream.)

“No,” Rachel said. “I want to have a private conversation.”

Kurt was silent for a moment. “Why? Are you going to break up with me?”

“As if,” she said. “I just – I have something I want to talk about. Also, I want to see you in that scarf your Aunt Mildred sent you from Milan for Christmas. It looks really dope on you.”

He acquiesced.

They met at the cemetery where his mother was buried. That’s where they often went for their more serious talks, because it was big and quiet and none of the other kids from school were ever there – at least not during the day.  The frost sparkled on the headstones. They started their walk by each leaving a small round rock on his mother’s grave, the way that Rachel had taught him to do their first visit there.

 _“_ Flowers are a nice memorial, but they fade,” she had told him. “In Judaism, we put stones on people’s graves because a stone is permanent, like the memory we have of our loved one.” Kurt wasn’t fond of religion, but he liked the sentiment so he adopted the practice as his own.

Kurt grew suspicious when Rachel lingered at the grave longer than usual after laying down her stone. “You didn’t come here to sing, ‘Papa, Can You Hear Me?’ to my mother, did you?” he said. “Because she’s my mother. You don’t have the right.”

Rachel shook her head and folded her arm around his elbow. “No,” she said. “I was just thinking,” she said. “I’m nervous.”

“What about?” he said as they started their turn around the cemetery.

“About what I want to talk about.”

He didn’t answer.

“Kurt,” she said, “what was it about the movie that made you cry?”

Kurt stiffened, but they kept walking. “Barbra Streisand has a beautiful voice,” he said. “And sometimes it frustrates me that I still haven’t mastered that very narrow vibrato that she does. Watching that movie – it was like she was just rubbing it in my fave for two-and-a-half hours. I couldn’t take it after a while.”

Rachel scrunched her eyebrows. “No way,” she said. “That is  _not_  why you were crying.”

“Way,” Kurt smirked. “Isn’t that why you were crying?”

She smiled and shook her head. “No. I was crying because –” she swallowed hard. “I was crying because it reminded me of my parents.”

Kurt stopped walking and looked at her curiously. “Your mother is a cross-dressing yeshiva student? You always told me she was a vocal coach in Hoboken.”

Rachel sighed. “She  _is._ But I wasn’t talking about my mother. I was talking about – about LeRoy and Hiram.”

“Hiram is your uncle.”

“Well, technically,” she said. “But I consider him my father.”

“That makes sense. You’ve lived with him your whole life,“ Kurt said. “I still don’t see what that has to do with  _Yentl.”_

“Really?” she said. “You don’t?”

Kurt shook his head.

“Let’s just say that  _Yentl_ reminded me of them for the same reason that it reminded you of yourself.”

She felt his arm starting to tremble, even though it wasn’t that cold. “I don’t understand what you mean,” he said. “And I’m not sure I want to.”

She let go of his arm and faced him. “You’ve fallen in love with a boy, haven’t you? Just like – just like Hiram and LeRoy did when they met each other at Rutgers.”

Kurt didn’t answer the question. His face crumpled and all the anguish from all the years of confusion and hiding and fear bubbled up as furiously as they had the night before in the movie theater. He let out a sob that was louder than anything he’d let out before in this cemetery, even on the day he watched his mother being lowered into the ground.

“Oh, honey,” Rachel said, and flung her arms around him and pulled him close, pressing her face into his neck. “It’s okay. Everything will be okay.”

*

Rachel took Kurt home to talk to her dads. They told him the true story: how they met at Rutgers, then moved together to San Francisco. It was liberating, in some ways. They got involved with the homophile movement (“The what?” Kurt said; “Gay liberation,” Hiram explained; Kurt hadn’t heard of that, either), and they found so many people who were like them. But they wanted a quieter life, away from the city and the bars. And then Hiram’s younger sister Shelby made that happen, when she showed up at their apartment a few weeks before her graduation from Stanford, bawling her eyes out.

She was pregnant. And she wanted LeRoy to marry her.

“But I’m black,” said LeRoy.

“So’s the father,” Shelby said. “Actually, he looked kind of like you. I guess my brother and I have similar taste.” It was the first time anyone from either Hiram or LeRoy’s families had acknowledged what they were.

“I’m not Jewish,” LeRoy said.

“Well,” she said, “you and my brother are practically married. Don’t you think it’s about time you converted?”

So he did, and he married Shelby, and the three of them moved to Ohio because it was a good place to raise a child and be closer to both their families without being too close. And then, a year after Rachel was born, Shelby asked for a divorce and moved back to the East Coast. Hiram and LeRoy stayed in Lima.

"But Lima is … generic,” Kurt said.

Hiram and LeRoy looked at each other, then at Kurt. “We have each other, and we have Rachel. That’s all we need,” Hiram said. “Anyway, if we’d stayed in San Francisco –” He blinked back tears. “Almost everyone we stayed in touch with from San Francisco is dead now.”

Kurt wondered if Hiram and LeRoy would die soon, too, or if they were safe because they’d been in Ohio for the past 15 years. He hoped it was the latter – not only for their sake and Rachel’s sake, but because it would mean that he was safe, too.

*

Kurt and Rachel broke up, but they hung out as much as they ever had before. Most people thought they were still going out, including Burt Hummel. He only figured it out the next school year, when Rachel started dating Finn Hudson.

He came home from the garage to find Kurt crying in his room. The picture of Kurt and Rachel that had been next to his bed was no longer in the frame. It had been ripped to shreds and scattered across the floor. “Oh, kid,” Burt said, settling on the bed and pulling Kurt up into his arms. “What happened?”

“She– she– she–” he gasped.

Burt rubbed Kurt’s back and reminded him to inhale.

Kurt did, but it was only enough air to get out the words, “Finn Hudson,” before he broke into sobbing again.

Burt had known that Kurt loved Rachel, but he’d had no idea he was in this deep. Burt kissed the top of his son and rocked him the way he did back when Kurt was just a baby, when a father’s love was enough to stop his crying.

*

After Rachel started going out with Finn, he stopped talking to her for a while. He’d also shut himself in his room a lot and sing along to the  _Yentl_  soundtrack, from start to finish, over and over.

It drove Burt nuts. His kid had a great voice, but Jesus, Mary and Joseph, a person can only take so much Barbra Streisand.

Burt took to wearing earplugs around the house.

*

And then, one morning when Burt was too sick with the flu to go to the garage, Kurt started singing one of those  _Yentl_  songs in the shower. It was … nice, actually, without that cloying symphony and Barbra’s nasally whine to drown the ethereal clarity of Kurt’s voice out.

Burt closed his eyes and listened.

_There’s someone who must hear the words I’ve never spoken._  
_Tonight if he were here my silence would be broken._  
_I need him to touch me, to know the love that’s in my heart –  
_ _The same heart that tells me to see myself, to free myself, to be myself at last!_

Burt Hummel felt like someone had just dropped a rock on his stomach, and it wasn’t because of his flu.

*

Kurt started talking to Rachel again. Pretty soon they were spending almost as much time together as they had before, often with Mercedes Jones in tow.

On a Wednesday night, Kurt asked if he could have dinner at Rachel’s the following night so he, Rachel and Mercedes so they could work together on their audition for the school’s spring musical,  _Guys and Dolls_. Kurt and Rachel were going for the male and female romantic leads; Mercedes wanted to be Adelaide.

“Finn won’t be jealous?” Burt had said. “If you and Rachel get the parts you want?”

Kurt rolled his eyes. “It’s just acting, Dad. Finn knows we’re professionals.”

“And you’re not trying to rekindle an old flame?” Burt knew Kurt wasn’t, but he prodded anyway. He thought that maybe, if he irritated Kurt enough, his son would eventually become so fed up he’d just out with the truth.

Kurt gave that superior look he must have cultivated from too many Saturday nights spent watching Katharine Hepburn movies on UHF. “Don’t be such a dufus,” he said. “I’m dating Mercedes now. She’s much prettier than Rachel.”

“When did that happen? Am I the last person to hear everything around here?”

“Yesterday,” Kurt said. “And yes, you are.”

Burt probably should have grounded him for the sass, but he didn’t. He kind of liked that his kid could be so strong-willed.

It was a character trait he’d need to hold onto if he was going to survive this world.

So Thursday night rolled around, and Burt Hummel was at home alone, standing in front of the TV and turning the knob to see if anything good was on. A news segment on PBS caught his attention.

It was about AIDS.

Burt sat on the couch and watched it and cried for his son’s future.

But he also took notes.

The next day after work, he went to the public library to look up one of the organizations the news segment had mentioned. A reference librarian helped him locate the New York City phone book; he thanked her and then took it to a corner where no one was around, flipping through the pages until he found what he was looking for: Gay Men’s Health Crisis. He copied down the phone number and address into the small notebook he kept in his coatpocket and went home.

*

_To whom it may concern:_

_I think my son might be gay and I don’t want him to get sick. Please send me any information that could help._

_Sincerely,  
Burt Hummel_

Burt enclosed a stamped, self-addressed envelope and a $5 bill to cover materials, then dropped the letter in the mailbox at the corner and waited.

*

The envelope came back in the mail two weeks later. It was fat, and extra stamps had been put on it. Burt made a mental note to send GMHC another $5.

It was a Saturday, and Kurt was out shopping with Mercedes. Burt opened the envelope, started looking through the materials, wished he hadn’t started looking through the materials, and then closed his eyes. He wasn’t sure if it was the idea of gay sex that was bothering him, or just the idea of Kurt having sex at all. It had been hard enough giving Kurt the birds and bees talk when he was 11; Burt wasn’t sure how he was going to survive this.

So he wimped out. He took the envelope, went into Kurt’s room, and set it right in the middle of Kurt’s neatly made bed.

Burt was in the living room reading the newspaper when Kurt got home. His son was in a delightful mood, swinging his shopping bag happily and humming one of Barbra Streisand’s happier tunes to himself. He chirped out a delighted “Hi, Dad!” and skipped up the stairs to his room.

Then he stopped singing.

“Dad? Has Rachel been over here?” Kurt called down the stairs.

“Nope.”

“Or … um … anyone else?”

“Nope.”

Burt heard Kurt’s footsteps on the stairs. He stopped halfway down, so that all Burt could see of him were his black Capezios and white ankle socks.

“But … someone left something on my bed.”

Burt folded his newspaper shut and set it on the coffee table. He stood up and walked to the bottom of the stairs. It was time to be the father that Kurt deserved.

He looked up into Kurt’s eyes. In the light that was coming through the window at the top of the stairs, his eyes were that same piercing grey-blue that Burt fell in love with when he saw it in Kurt’s mother all those years ago. He would never stop loving those eyes, or either of the people they belonged to.

“I did,” Burt said.

Kurt grabbed onto the banister with one hand, pulled at the hem of his bolero jacket with the other. “But … why?”

“I just – I thought that maybe when you and Rachel broke up, it wasn’t Rachel that you were heartbroken over.”

Kurt’s cheeks flushed.

Burt took a step up toward him. “And I don’t know if you are … that way, but  _if_  you are –” Burt took another step up. “I love you, and I don’t want to lose you too early like I lost your mom.”

Kurt sank down onto the step. He looked at his dad, and blinked, and looked away. He closed his eyes.

Burt sat down next to him, put a hand on Kurt’s shaking shoulder. “Say something, Kurt?”

Kurt was silent. Burt could tell that he was trying to keep his face still; but the small muscles in it were rippling and spasming against his will.

“Did I do wrong?” Burt said.

Kurt shook his head slowly, and opened his eyes. Tears spilled out of them. “No,” he said, looking at his dad. “You did right.”

*

For Kurt’s birthday that year, Burt bought a VHS copy of  _Yentl._  Kurt gave his dad a quizzical look when he opened it. “But we don’t have a VCR.”

Burt shrugged. “I know, but you’re over at Rachel’s so much anyway, I figured you could watch it there.”

Kurt smiled and kissed his dad on the cheek. “Thanks, Dad.”

Burt huffed. “Kid, that was way too easy. Aren’t you supposed to press the issue a bit?”

“Um, I don’t know. Should I?”

Burt couldn’t hold in the surprise any longer. He pulled Kurt into the living room and dragged a heavy box out from under the coffee table. “It’s not exactly a birthday present, ‘cause it’s for both of us, but – happy birthday, kid.”

It was a VCR, of course.

Kurt watched  _Yentl_  over and over again that summer, rewinding his favorite scenes so many times that the tape finally broke at the end of July. So he went to the video rental store to order another copy.

The boy who was working the counter was new, and pretty, and had a small gold stud in his right earlobe. Kurt tried not to stare.

“Hi,” Kurt said. “Can I ask you a question?”

The boy blinked his velvety eyelashes and laughed a laugh that was friendly and sweet and made Kurt’s insides feel like they had turned to jelly. It was a delicious feeling. “That’s what I’m here for.”

“I need to order a video. For purchase.”

“Oh, sure,” the boy said, pulling out a form from a fat accordion file and sliding it across the counter toward Kurt. “Just fill this out.”

Kurt filled it out and handed it back, chewed on his lip while the boy looked it over. Kurt had been made fun of for liking  _Yentl_  before, and just because this kid was wearing an earring in his right ear – well, it didn’t always mean the same thing that it used to. Maybe Kurt would be made fun of again.

But the boy just beamed when he looked up. “ _Yentl_  is my favorite movie ever.”

“Are you Jewish?” Kurt said, and then wanted to kick himself for being such a dweeb.

“Um, no,” the boy said, still smiling. “I just really like it.”

“Me, too,” Kurt said. “I mean,” he swallowed nervously, “Barbra Streisand is a genius and  _Yentl_  is her best work.”

“I agree on both accounts.” The boy glanced back down at the form again and reached across the counter to offer his hand. “Kurt Hummel, my name is Blaine. I’m new around here.”

Kurt took Blaine’s hand and shook it and let go, even though what he wanted to do was just hold onto it the way he used to hold onto Rachel’s. Blaine’s palm was warm without being clammy, and his fingers felt soft and strong at the same time. “Nice to meet you, Blaine.”

“Maybe we can watch  _Yentl_  together sometime,” Blaine said, and Kurt thought he saw the tiniest hint of a blush spread across his lovely, lovely cheeks.

“I would like that,” Kurt said, smiling so hard his face hurt. “I’d like that a lot.”


End file.
